


don't you dare let go

by tobeconvincedoflove



Series: hospitals, hand-holding, and hugs [2]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, Hospitals, M/M, Panic Attacks, combeferre is worried, everyone is worried, grantaire is a wonderful boyfriend but i can't write him to save my life, hurt!enjolras, i didn't even edit it wow i'm going to regret this, mentions of rape and rape flashbacks, you guys wanted a sequel so I can blame you for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 10:56:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1344889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobeconvincedoflove/pseuds/tobeconvincedoflove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been thirteen hours. Somehow, Enjolras is simoultaneously better and worse. (Companion to 'i'll keep your hand in mine until you die')</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't you dare let go

**Author's Note:**

> Ask and you shall receive. Let me know what you think (this is unedited and probalby crap).

_(hands run down his entire body, roughly grabbing him and spinning him and smashing him against the ground. he’s screaming.)_

“Shit… nurse… tube… Enjolras… calm… okay” Then blackness. 

_(his pants are pulled down and he’s pinned down. fighting is doing nothing. he’s never been this scared)_

“Come on, Enjolras, you can do it.” More darkness.

_(after it’s finally gone he doesn’t have a second to breathe before a fist hits his kidney. there’s blood from before pouring out of his mouth)_

“Please wake up, please wake up, please wake up,” a voice says, but it’s the pressure on Enjolras’s hand that forces his eyes open. Almost immediately, they squint at the brightness, and suddenly he’s hyperaware of the tube down his throat. It’s impossible not to gag on it and flinch at the pain in his chest, but one of the nurses (wait what? he was in a hospital?) quickly calms him down enough to slowly drag it out. Free to breathe, Enjolras looks towards the pressure still on his right hand, just realizing his entire left arm is pinned to his chest. When he sees Grantaire in all of his scruffy glory, he manages a small smile behind the numbness slowly setting in. 

“Don’t you fucking do that again.” Grantaire’s voice is shaky and tired and there’s a tear in one of his eyes and Enjolras wished he could remember past the assaulting fuzziness. 

“I’m confused. I don’t remember,” he tries to say, but it’s more of an odd, painful noise at the back of his throat. 

“Shit, don’t talk, Enjolras. Your throat is really swollen; that’s why they had that tube down it,” Grantaire explains, so you just shoot him a look. 

“Ferre,” he manages to articulate, waving his arm about angrily as he struggles to form the right sounds. It’s hard to do around the sharp pain in his throat and chest, and it takes Grantaire’s hand pressing down on Enjolras’s arm (careful to avoid the mess of wires and tubes) to stop his boyfriend from curling into a ball from the pain. The nurses had stressed how they couldn’t let Enjolras do that—not with the stitches and the ribs and five-hundred other things. 

“He’s just outside. It was my turn to sit with you,” Grantaire explains quietly, laying a kiss on his boyfriend’s hand. “He’s going to be here in a minute, I promise. So will your doctor.”

“Tell… you gotta… sorry.” Enjolras knows it didn’t come out right, but he is starting to remember through the haze of drugs, and he was scared and guilty and he didn’t know what to do. He remembers the man on his way home, he remembers all of that though he really wished he didn’t, but he remembers getting to the hospital. Joly had literally held Enjolras together while Combeferre held his hand. And Enjolras was sick with the guilt of forcing his friends to see him like that. 

“You’re not making sense, love,” Grantaire explains, looking extremely relieved when Combeferre entered the room quietly, a doctor in tow. “Do you need me to leave?” After Combeferre shakes his head silently, just staring at his best friend, Grantaire smiled a little and squeezed Enjolras’s hand. “He’s still really out of it. Or really high on morphine. I can’t tell.”

“He is on a high level of morphine,” the other doctor says quietly to Grantaire, before addressing Enjolras (introducing himself, explaining the surgery, etc). Combeferre had pulled up a chair next to Grantaire, and the tension leaves his shoulders as the steady beeping of the machines let him know everything was okay. Well, relatively. 

“Happen’… police,” Enjolras slurs at Combeferre, who seemed to understand. 

“They’re looking for him. And once they find him, they’ll match his DNA to the hair you pulled out.” Combeferre’s voice is gentle, but shaky. To be honest, he’s just relieved Enjolras was too high to really register what had happened. He didn’t know if Enjolras’s body could handle that on top of everything. 

After the doctor does an examination, Enjolras’s eyelids slowly grow heavier and Grantaire just nods at Combeferre, lightly kisses his boyfriend’s forehead, and leaves, hoping he can make it far enough away so that Enjolras can’t hear him sob. 

“Sorry.” Enjolras’s voice is quiet, and he can barely bring himself to look his best friend in the eyes, but the doctor’s familiar hand just slips into his own. 

“Don’t you dare. None of this is your fault” is Combeferre’s reply, as his thumb traces circles on Enjolras’s hand, and the response is visible. The tension that had built up slowly dissipates, but Combeferre knows it’s temporary.

“Remember you. ‘N Joly,” the blond man explains a few seconds later, before his grey eyes finally slip shut. And just like that, everything falls apart again. It’s been nearly thirteen hours since he’d last seen Enjolras, and twenty hours since he came into the ER, bleeding and dangerously bordering life and death, and Enjolras _remembers_. It’s so fucking typical of him to, even when he’s sky high on morphine, Combeferre thinks. Fuck what Combeferre had been through, he was just terrified because he knew what had happened to Enjolras, and how can Enjolras be worried about him when he’d just almost died. 

But that’s Enjolras. Every damn time Combeferre had sat by his bedside as a teenager, whether it be for pneumonia (seriously, Enjolras has gotten it four times already. How?) or the panic attacks or the asthma attacks, or the one time it was both of them at once, Enjolras would avoid talking about how he was. It was like he was embarrassed, and guilty that someone had to see him actually hurt or sick. 

How is Enjolras going to cope with this?

How is Combeferre? He can’t understand why someone chose his best friend, his little brother, to hurt. No matter how much Combeferre tries to rationalize it—he’s seen patients the same and worse than Enjolras—he can’t. Enjolras is different, and Combeferre can’t ignore the anxiety and the worry and the fear piling up in his stomach. Because Enjolras isn’t okay, and he probably never will be completely okay again, and it’s all too fucking much. 

The tears are still flowing freely, hot and accompanied by wretched sobs, when Grantaire comes back, Courfeyrac and Bahorel in tow. It’s Courfeyrac’s turn to stay with Enjolras (not that Combeferre is going to leave), and Bahorel is there because of Grantaire. He’s taking the artist back to his and Enjolras’s flat and forcing him to sleep for a few hours, but Grantaire won’t leave without saying goodbye. 

Is Combeferre a horrible person because he’s hardly paused to think about Grantaire? He has never seen two people so passionately in love with each other as Grantaire and Enjolras, despite all of their differences and fights. He can’t be handling it well, Combeferre thinks, and (sure enough) that’s when he notices how Grantaire’s hands are shaking. Giving the other man a fierce hug, Combeferre tries to convey his apology, and how he knows how much this hurts. When Grantaire grips him like a lifeline, rocking back and forth slightly, Combeferre knows he is understood, and releases the curly-haired man so he can squeeze Enjolras’s hand one more time, and kiss his cheek lightly before Bahorel basically pushes him out of the room. 

“Grantaire said he woke up for a few minutes,” Courfeyrac says immediately, sitting down next to Combeferre, who was lightly holding his (their) best friend’s hand. “Was he…?” The first few times Enjolras had tried pulling himself out of unconsciousness, he had hit a panic attack before he could fully wake up, and would fall back into deep sleep once the nurses (or Grantaire) had gotten him to calm down enough. 

“He was calmer. High as a kite, actually.” And, lo and behold, Combeferre actually chuckles a little at the end. “I forgot how incoherent he is on hospital drugs; he couldn’t get a full word out.” 

“But?” Courfeyrac prompts quietly, knowing that something, besides the obvious, was eating at Combeferre.

“He remembered. The attack… but he remembered Joly and I before the surgery,” he explains, unable to meet Courfeyrac’s eyes. 

“Shit, I-“ Courfeyrac is about to say more, but Enjolras decides that now is the right moment to wake up, this time nowhere near as calm as before. It isn’t a panic attack, but it’s painfully close, and before Combeferre can act, he’s bolted up to a sitting position, practically screaming in pain. 

“Get a doctor,” Combeferre orders, and Courfeyrac presses the red panic button by Enjolras and runs, while Combeferre puts his hands on Enjolras’s shoulders.

“It’s okay, it’s me, it’s Combeferre, you’re safe. Come on, Enjolras, wake up, please wake up,” he says calmly, trying to stop his sobbing friend from ripping stitches or rupturing his already fragile organs. Something must click, though, because in an instant, Enjolras throws the arm not pinned to his chest around Combeferre, sobbing and wheezing and refusing to let go. In response, Combeferre lightly wraps his arms around his best friend (careful of his injuries), who immediately buries his head into Combeferre’s shoulder. They stay like that for almost a minute while the doctor arrives, and Enjolras does not loosen his grip on Combeferre until the doctor has injected a sedative into the (miraculously still attached) line and the blonde is asleep once more. That’s when Combeferre gently lays his friend back down onto the mattress. 

“Please tell me he’s going to be okay,” Courfeyrac whispers from his corner in the room. 

“I don’t know.” There’s something about the way Combeferre’s voice cracks that causes the other man to grip him tight, almost exactly like Enjolras just had. But this time, Combeferre grips hard back, letting more tears flow freely.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do now, but with Courfeyrac telling him over and over that Enjolras is going to be okay, that they’re all going to be okay, Combeferre almost believes it.

Almost.


End file.
